At last! What I wanted to say to the Muslim community is published on The Straits Times.
Although I am not a Muslim, I did read some of the Sufi teachings and appreciated them.
PAGE 18 | THE STRAITS TIMES, TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 12 2006
Sufi antidote to religious terrorismI ALMOST fell off my seat in the cavernous NTUC auditorium on Marina Bay last week. Reason? I was listening to an American academic, Professor Abd al-Haqq Alan Godlas, saying in all professorial earnestness that the root cause problems confronting humanity was egotism. This is what you get when you get a Sufi to talk about worldly affairs, I muttered under my breath.
The way I understood it then, Sufism was a form of Islamic mysticism and spirituality, with Sufis often associated with reclusiveness and withdrawal from social and political activities. So it was a bit rich for them to think that they could fix the world's problems simply by exhorting ppeople to overcome their egotism, I thought to myself.
But at the end of a week of lectures, I realised that Prof Godlas, who teaches Islamic studies at the University of Georgia in the US and is well-known for his Islamic studies and Sufism website, was dead serous. So were the other half a dozen Sufi scholars from the US, Britain, Malaysia and Singapore who had gathered here to show how effective the Way of the Sufi could be in creating a peaceful, integrated and harmonious global society.
Among them was a Briton of Pakistani descent, Aftab Malik, currently a visiting fellow at the Center for Ethnicity and Culture at the University of Birmingham. He noted: "Zealotry and hate are specific traits identified as detrimental to the soul and Islam's spiritual tradition has always played a vital role in purging these diseases from the heart." In short, Sufism is another name for Islam's spiritual tradition, no less.
And from Ustaz Mohamed Alid, a Singaporean Muslim leader: "There is an urgent need today to revieve the discipline of
tasawwuf (Sufism) and its system of
tariqah (Sufi Orders). Social ills are rooted in the diseases of the heart. It is incumbent on every Muslim to be a Sufi."
The young Ustaz Mohamed Ali is the son of Ustaz Ali Mohamed, chairman of the Khadijah Mosque and also leader of the local chapter of a tariqah group.
The series of public talks culminated in a two-day conference organised by the Aleem Siddique Mosque, which is named after a great Sufi scholar, Maulana Shah Muhammad Abdul Aleem Siddique, who played a pivotal role in the setting up of the Inter Religious Organisation (IRO) in Singapore in 1949.
The conference provided the Sufis with an opportunity to debunk various "myths" surrounding Sufism. For instance:
>> It is not true that Sufism is not an integral part of the syariah (Islamic jurisprudence), as detractors claim.
As the 8th-century Islamic scholar Imam Malik said: "He who learns syariah and neglects
tasawwuf becomes a reprobate; he who learn
tasawwuf and neglects syariah becomes an aspotate. But he who combines both will reach the Truth."
>> It is not true either that Sufism was derived from Greek and Buddhist sources. Nor is it some kind of "Islamic mysticism" as some Western writers want you to believe.
Rather, Sufism is the spiritual dimension of Islam which has been abandoned during the past 200 years when more attention was given to the syariah.
>> Muslims who believe that Sufism is an innovation (
bid'ah) - something which was not practised during the first three generation of Muslims - also have it wrong, the scholars argue.
Black boxTHE underlying current in their messages, I detected, was that Sufism offered a natural antithesis in the fight against a virulent strain of Islam, which some analysts have now described as radical Wahhabism, which had its beginnings in 18th-century Saudi Arabia.
Renowned Middle Eastern expert Bernard Lewis agrees. Sufism is "remarkable" and "offers something better than tolerance", he told a conference organised by the Nixon Center, an American think-thank, in 2003 to introduce Sufism to US policy-makers.
The underlying current in their messages...was that Sufism offered a natural antithesis in the fight against a virulent strain of Islam, which some analysts have now described as radical Wahhabism, which had its beginnings in 18th-Century Saudi Arabia.
As he noted, the attitude to people of other religions exhibited in Sufi writings is without parallel. Indeed it is not just tolerance, it is acceptance. Poems by Sufi writers extol the same message: All religions have the same purpose, the same message, the same communication, and they worship the same God.
They may do so in different ways, but God is equally there in church, in mosque and in synagogue, he said.
The same message was heard by participants at the week-long programme in Singapore. It came from the irrepressible and controversial Shyakh Hisham Kabbani, the deputy leader of Napshbandi haqqani Sufi Order, which has over two million adherents around the world. He leads the Islamic Supreme Council of America in the US.
In an interview with the Middle Easter Quarterly in 2000, he put it rather beautifully: "We all aspire to the same goal: to worship God in a way that satisfies us and that pleases the Lord. Looking at it in this way provides a basis for all people of faith to find a common cause and find a way to achieve harmony and to work. It is like we are all together inside a big black box with many pinholes along the exterior. We look out and see pinpoints of light shining in. each person picks one source of light and says "that is the one I follow". But outside the box, there is only one sun shining."
There is yet another reaons why the Sufis could perhaps play a bigger role in countering terrorism: Theri system of
tariqah requires that Islamic knowledge would have to be learned from acknowledged teachers. That would help curtail the influence of non-mainstream teachings on the Internet on young Muslims, particularly in minority Muslim societies in the West.
Nothing reflects better the seriousness of these Sufis in wanting to assert what they consider their natural role in guiding the ummah than the setting up of the Sufi Muslim Council in July in Britain - "a non-profit, non-governmental religious organisation dedicated to working for the cause of Islam".
The council represents "a silent majority frustrated with slow progress since the London bombings of July last year", it said. The launch, significantly, was held at the House of Commons, with several leaders of Britain's main political parties attending.
Not that the establishment of the council has been problem-free. Some British Muslims see it as an attempt to usurp the role currently played by the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), set up in 1997 to represent more than 250 Muslim organisations around the country. A recent survey showed that eight of 10 polled thought that the MCB had not done nearly enough to combat anti-Western extremism. The SMC's spiritual leader, Shaykh Kabbani, believes that the time has come for governments to empower Sufis like him in the war on terror.